Recently, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared the emperor penguin to be an endangered species.
About Sentinel Species:
It is a species whose members’ health signals the condition of the ecosystem in which they live.
Characteristics: They are among the first to respond to stressors in their environment, such as pollution and disease.
Their response also tends to be more apparent than most other species.
They can provide early warnings of ecosystem decline.
These species tend to occupy a fixed territory and live long enough to accumulate toxins.
They also have physiologies that amplify the effects of environmental Thus, when something goes wrong in their habitat, they show it first.
Examples:
Frog: Their skin is permeable and absorbs whatever enters the water or soil around them, making them very sensitive to pesticides and pathogens.
Canaries in coal mines worked on the same principle: the bird’s faster metabolism made it succumb to carbon monoxide before human miners could notice anything.
Honeybees: Researchers used this to track agricultural chemical loads.
Polar bears are observed to monitor Arctic contaminant accumulation
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